Give the (Digital) Gift of Gratitude with Tribute

Imagine being honored and recognized by your family, closest friends and colleagues, each outpouring their appreciation and love for who you’ve been for them. While this kinda thing occasionally happens at various celebratory events, the main event that tends to spur people to get clear about their feelings for you is a memorial service–an event that for many of us is hard to fully appreciate (depending on your perspective on life-after-death). A new service called Tribute is trying to make pre-mortem expressions of love and appreciation a little easier to organize and give.

Tribute starts when an organizer sends invites to various “tribe” members of someone they want to honor. Invitees are asked to create short videos about that someone. These videos are then put into a pool, which are then available to edit and create one master video montage. Invitees can make their videos on their desktops, smartphones or any other video devices. Invitees are given regular reminders to make sure they do their videos in a timely manner.

For an extra $100, you can have a Tribute concierge handle the whole process aside from providing email addresses and some basic info. When all the videos are received, compiled and edited, Tribute makes a HD mp4 file that can be given as-is or uploaded to Youtube, Vimeo or any other video service.

I watched a few Tribute videos given for various reasons: birthdays, sickness/injury recovery, wedding, etc. And while some people were clearly better at expressing themselves than others, the overall effect was moving. I would be very pleased if I received one as a gift.

Tribute is currently raising money through Kickstarter to get their website and mobile app refined and launched. When live, a standard Tribute will cost $49 and a concierge-assisted one $149 (you can still buy a $29 “Cyber Monday” promo pledge that will get you the standard Tribute).

What’s great about Tribute is that it really puts technology to good use. Whereas e-cards can sometimes feel like a lazy version of a handwritten note, Tribute does something analog tech can’t. It’s a sharable, visual, no-clutter distillation of gratitude–something that has actually been clinically proven to make people happy, something that can’t be said of most of the stuff we buy as gifts.